Review
AI
Art
Culture
5 min read

Art, AI and apocalypse: Michael Takeo Magruder addresses our fears and questions

The digital artist talks about the possibilities and challenges of artificial intelligence.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A darkened art gallery displays images and screens on three walls.
Takeo.org.

In the current fractured debate about the future development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, artists are among those informing our understanding of the issues through their creative use of technologies. British-American visual artist Michael Takeo Magruder is one such, with his current exhibition Un/familiar Terrain{s} infusing leading-edge AI systems with traditional artistic practices to reimagine the world anew. In so doing, this exhibition pushes visitors to question the organic nature of their own memories and the unsettling notions of automatic processing, misattribution, and reconstruction. 

The exhibition uses personal footage of specific places of renowned natural beauty that has been captured on first generation AI-enabled smartphones. Every single frame of the source material has then been revised, reworked, and rebuilt into digital prints and algorithmic videos which recast these captured moments as uncanny encounters. In this exhibition at Washington DC’s Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, the invisible work of the AI allows people to experience more than there ever was, expanding both time and space. 

Magruder has been using Information Age technologies and systems to examine our networked, media-rich world for over 25 years. A residency in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London resulted in De/coding the Apocalypse, an exhibition exploring contemporary creative visions inspired by and based on the Book of Revelation. Imaginary Cities explored the British Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps to create provocative fictional cityscapes for the Information Age. 

JE: You are a visual artist who works with emerging media including real-time data, digital archives, VR environments, mobile devices, and AI processes. What is it about the possibilities and challenges of emerging media that captures your artistic imagination? 

MTM: As a first-generation digital native, computer technologies – and the evolving range of potentials they offer – have deeply informed my life and art. Computational media not only opens different avenues for artistic expression but provides a novel means to recontextualise traditional artforms and histories of practice; its ephemeral nature is a particular draw. However, this also creates new challenges, especially in areas concerning preservation and access. I sometimes wonder if my art will still exist for future generations to experience in full, or if it will simply fade alongside the technologies that I’ve used in its production. 

JE: To what extent does Un/familiar Terrain{s} build on past exhibitions like Imaginary Landscapes and Imaginary Cities, and to what extent does it break new ground for you? 

MTM: Un/familiar Terrain{s} certainly arises from and expands on the artistic concepts of those past projects. The main difference is that each artwork in Un/familiar Terrain{s} is generated from a small sample of personal data (a scenic moment that I’ve captured intentionally), not digital materials gleaned from large public archives and online collections.      

JE: Do you find that working with images of the natural world (as is the case with this exhibition) as opposed to images of human-made environments (as you did with 'Imaginary Cities') leads to different approaches or inspiration on your part? 

MTM: My projects that explore constructed environments often reference principles of Modernist architecture and design whereas my pieces in Un/familiar Terrain{s} explicitly seek to dialogue with the long history of Western landscape art. The AI systems that I have used in their creation are leading edge but conversely, their conceptual references extend back to long before the onset of what we consider ‘modern’ art.  

JE: I've heard many artists criticise digital art in terms of degrading the principal tools and techniques of artists throughout history and those arguments would be made even more vigorously in relation to AI. In this exhibition you're enabling a conversation about the painterly effects you can create as a digital artist and those that can be achieved through AI, yet without leading us to one side or other of that argument. Is your vision essentially one of wanting to see the possibilities in whatever tools, techniques or technologies we have to hand? 

MTM: Absolutely. For me that’s one of the fundamental purposes of art. AI is unquestionably the most disruptive (and potentially problematic) technology affecting creative communities at present, but it’s just the most recent historical example. I imagine similar criticisms arose during the proliferation of devices like the printing press and the first photographic cameras. Such inventions clearly did not ‘degrade’ art, but they indisputably shifted its trajectory. 

JE: While your work is not expressly religious, you have engaged with theological themes and institutions as with Un/familiar Terrain{s}, which is on show at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington DC. What do you think it is about your work and the ways you use and explore emerging media that enables such a dialogue to take place?  

MTM: I feel that many of the social and ethical questions raised by the emergence of transformative digital technologies are quite similar (and sometimes identical) to ones that have been traditionally posed by theologians. With that in mind, although the fields are quite different in many ways, at present there are some strange and compelling intersections. 

JE: From your experience, what can theological or religious institutions learn from a more engaged involvement with emerging media, particularly AI? 

MTM: Like artists, perhaps theologians can use emerging (and disruptive) media to not only expand possibilities for their work, but more importantly, to refocus their efforts towards areas that these technologies cannot presently (and will likely never) address. 

JE: Apocalyptic scenarios are often invoked in response to developments such as AI, the refugee crisis, populist political movements or the climate emergency. In De/coding the Apocalypse, you worked with emerging media to explore contemporary creative visions inspired by and based on the Book of Revelation. From that experience, what advice would you give to emerging artists wanting to engage with or invoke apocalyptic imagery? How might emerging artists live in the shadow of apocalypse or what have you noticed about our contemporary fear of modern apocalypses? 

MTM: Throughout history, visions of apocalypse have been consistently rooted in humanity’s prevailing fears. In the Digital Age these sit alongside our growing concerns about technologies that afford increasingly greater potential to create or destroy. Of course, artists should continue to reveal the deeply problematic (and potentially apocalyptic) aspects of new technologies, but they should also highlight their positive aspects to encourage the creation of “a new heaven and a new earth” that can be a better place for all. 

 

Un/familiar Terrain{s}, 30 May – 18 September 2024, The Dadian Gallery, Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion.

Review
Art
Culture
5 min read

The collective effervescence of sport’s congregation

Art captures how sport and religion are entwined throughout history.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

An impressionist painting of runners bunched together on the bend of a track.
Robert Delaunay's Coureurs.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2022 I had the opportunity to attend the launch of Football and Religion: Tales of Hope, Passion & Play, a mixed media exhibition with works by Ed Merlin Murray, at the Aga Khan Centre Gallery. The exhibition explored the relationship between football and religion and how the two are often connected, with players praying on the pitch and fans observing religious rituals in tandem. The exhibition also examined football’s ability to champion social causes, promote marginalised voices, and create opportunities for inclusion and diversity 

The accompanying historical exhibits also revealed important collaborations with a variety of organisations and specialists in the field of football and religion. Among the archive material shown, books such as Thank God for Football! reveal that nearly one third of the clubs that have played in the English FA Premier League owe their existence to a church, while Four Four Jew: Football, fans and faith and Does Your Rabbi Know You Are Here? uncover a hidden history of Jewish involvement in English football. 

In an associated essay, ‘Football Is More Than A Secular Religion’, Dr Mark Doidge, Principal Research Fellow in the School of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Brighton, noted: “Sport and religion are intimately entwined throughout history. Ancient Greek funerary games were seen as the most fitting way of honouring the death of heroes. The Olympics were held in honour of Zeus, which is why the ancient site of Olympia is home to sanctuaries, temples, and sports facilities.” 

Sport metamorphosed into a practice of effort, competition, and record-setting, sanctioned by artists in works that reinforced the cult of sporting heroes, relayed by the press.

While not focusing specifically on religion, as did the Aga Khan Centre exhibition, exhibitions organised for the Paris 2024 Olympics are also exploring stories of sport as culture, impacting on gender, class, race, representation, celebrity, science, and art.  

En Jeu! Artists and Sport (1870-1930) at Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, builds up a portrait of the society of the second half of the nineteenth century, which gradually took pleasure in taking advantage of its free time to pursue sporting and leisure activities on land or water. Ranging from Impressionism to Cubism, the exhibition shows how sport and sportspeople were made into icons of modernity and the avant-garde. It also explores the ethical challenges and aesthetic aspects of how sports were perceived by artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas and examines the metaphorical meanings of the heroic figure of the artist as a sportsperson, characterized by determination, stamina and a form of resistance. 

The changing social codes of sporting circles, where venues became theatres of physical prowess, are also examined. Sport metamorphosed into a practice of effort, competition, and record-setting, sanctioned by artists in works that reinforced the cult of sporting heroes, relayed by the press. Artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac identified with the qualities of determination and endurance of these sportspeople who sought to surpass themselves.  

Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores how the modernist culture of Paris shaped the future of sport and the Olympic Games as we know and love it today. The exhibition looks at a pivotal moment when traditions and trailblazers collided, fusing the Olympics’ classical legacy with the European avant-garde spirit. Paris 1924 was a breakthrough that forever changed attitudes towards sporting achievement and celebrity, as well as body image and identity, nationalism and class, race and gender.  

The fusion of modern Parisian cultural style with the Olympics’ classical inheritance gave the event a striking visual impact. Curators Caroline Vout, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge and Professor Chris Young, Head of the School of Arts and Humanities University of Cambridge say: “The exhibition explores the look and feel of Paris 1924 as trailblazing and traditional, local and global, classical and contemporary. It brings together painting, sculpture, film, fashion, photography, posters and letters.” 

The exhibition also highlights the extraordinary achievements of the Cambridge University students who won no fewer than 11 Olympic medals for Great Britain that year, including the sprinter Harold Abrahams whose story inspired the award-winning film Chariots of Fire

Regular congregation at a sacred space to perform collective rituals creates a ‘collective effervescence’... 

Mark Doidge 

Paris 1924-2024: the Olympic Games, a mirror of societies at the Shoah Memorial in Paris highlights the issue of prejudice and discrimination, past and present by drawing on a century of the Olympic Games. Bringing together emblematic images of these sporting events, archive documents, films, extracts from the sporting press and personal accounts, the exhibition reveals the Games to be marked by friendship and excellence, but also as capable of being used for political ends which often reflect deep-seated trends in our societies. The exhibition pays particular attention to the Berlin Olympic Games organised by Nazi Germany in 1936 and to the athletes interned at Drancy during the Second World War. It also shows that the values of Olympism can be a real lever in the fight against racism and anti-Semitism and for a better society. 

Taken together, these exhibitions highlight the development of sport as a culture in ways that have a wide impact on society, including religion. In his essay, Mark Doidge highlights the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim who ‘identified that the key social components of religion are the foundational components of society’. Doidge notes that “Regular congregation at a sacred space to perform collective rituals creates a ‘collective effervescence’ where the individuals become a community and identify themselves as such”. He also notes the similarities with sport which provides a “way of understanding who we are - who we socialise with, how we see other people, and the ways in which we interact with others” – and which is, like life, “about rivalries and competition, solidarity and teamwork, division, and unity”.  

These similarities can lead some to privilege sport over religion but Doidge argues that sport “should recognise that religion is a key part of many people’s identity and sense of self, and work hard to be inclusive for all”. 

 

En Jeu! Artists and Sport (1870-1930), 4 April to September 2024, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. 

Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body, 19 July to 3 November 2024, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 

Paris 1924-2024: the Olympic Games, mirror of societies, 6 May to 9 June 2024, The Shoah Memorial, Paris.